Starting a Permaculture Garden Author Jenni Blackmore reflects on the principles of permaculture after years of experience. By Jenni Blackmore March 2016

Starting a Permaculture Garden Author Jenni Blackmore reflects on the principles of permaculture after years of experience. By Jenni Blackmore March 2016 100 inShare Squash, beans and sunflowers thriving on reclaimed forest floor. Photo by Jenni Blackmore Slideshow Content Tools Print Email Comments Jenni Blackmore presents a highly entertaining, personal account of how permaculture can be practiced in adverse conditions, allowing anyone to learn to live more sustainably in a less-than-perfect world. The perfect antidote to dense, high-level technical manuals, Permaculture for the Rest of Us presents the fundamental principles of this sometimes confusing concept in a humorous, reader-friendly way. You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Permaculture for the Rest of Us. When I first developed an interest in permaculture and started amassing a library of the great books available I’d gobble up the first few chapters but begin to lose my appetite when it came to zones and guilds, in part because the diagrams looked a little overwhelming in their apparent complexity. I was tempted to — okay, I did — hurriedly scan through those chapters so I could get back to the growing and harvesting parts that interested me the most. My abject fear of all things mathematical was rekindled by any mention of degrees of slope, angle of sunlight, or exactitude of compass points. In actual fact, the concepts of zones and sectors are based in common sense and are essential to any successful permaculture plan. Zones range from one to five, from the most often to the least often visited. For example, I don’t want to have to charge to the far end of the garden for some fresh basil, with my sauce already bubbling and company due to arrive in five minutes. Therefore zone one includes herb pots on the deck by the kitchen door. Potatoes, once planted, require almost no attention until harvest time, so they will be best placed in zone three. Sectors are like slices of a pie-chart that clearly define the sunniest spots, the wind tunnels, any natural water courses and so on. Once these characteristics have been itemized it’s much simpler to take full advantages of their attributes and take steps to minimize any negative effects. Having them drawn out on paper helps solidify the existence of these invisible boundaries. Every homestead, regardless of size, will be unique when laid out to incorporate permaculture ideals. This is one of the many wonderfully satisfying aspects of living in harmony with the natural world although, as with any retrofit, things don’t happen overnight. Patience is a virtue that doesn’t get mentioned often enough as a necessary requirement in many of the informative books already written on attaining the dream-state of sustainable living. On the other hand, even though things might not always zoom along on the permaculture way, they often seem to have a knack of integrating and developing very smoothly. A few years ago hurricane Juan ripped through Nova Scotia. If I was a paranoid type I’d believe it specifically targeted our property, leaving in its wake a gnarly, impassable wreck of fractured and uprooted trees. For a while we tried the “I can’t see you” and the “If we ignore it, it will go away” approaches, which were as successful as might be expected. Finally we began the painstaking (read aching muscles) job of first removing the debris and then attempting to reclaim the land. Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next